And those origins go back to Sherborn’s magnum
opus Index Animalium – a catalogue of every living or extinct animal
described between 1758 and 1850, along with the book or publication it was
first named in. A massive achievement by any standard, Index Animalium
covers about 9200 pages which appeared in eleven volumes between 1902 and 1933.
Sherborn spent 43 years of his life working on it – and even today, many
zoological disciplines continue relying on it as an important source for
references.

ICZN secretary Ellinor Michel

Currently, the major part of the works
indexed by Sherborn are easily accessible at BHL or are currently being
digitised by partner institutions of the BHL or BHL-Europe consortium. This
means researchers can easily verify the original sources directly, and see
whether the information in Sherborn’s Index is still up to date.

The Index itself was digitised by
Smithsonian Institution Libraries in 2004, and can be consulted online. Currently, SIL is working on new
indexing facilities that will link the Index directly to Sherborn’s cited
literature sources, which were given in cryptic abbreviations and acronyms.
Accordingly, BHL could provide links from the digitised literature sources to
the taxonomic names extracted from the early works by Sherborn’s Index and
similar projects. This would definitely be useful for researchers who need to
find the original descriptions of animal species and genera, making it a useful
supplementary service to the “Taxon Finder”-tool.

In the wrap-up
discussion of the Symposium, Richard Pyle focused on the idea of a Global Names Architecture
that interconnects all existing biodiversity related data initiatives, ranging
from gathering specimens in the field to reviewing the published legacy and
publication of new taxa.

It is estimated that in 2020, 80% of all research output will only be published in digital form. Which goes to show that the first ever summit on digital preservation, held in Hamburg, Germany, from 19 to 20 October, proved to be more relevant than ever.

120 international IT experts were in attendance to discuss a plethora of issues. The lack of consensus on reliable file formats to use for digital preservation, for instance. Or the budget restrictions plaguing major content holders. Or even the difficulties to establish national policies for digital preservation.

One of the common threads throughout the summit was the lack of public awareness for the importance of digital preservation. In the words of Steve Knight from the National Library of New Zealand: “Digital preservation is about as familiar to people as space walking”. How fitting that he chose to illustrate his point with the loss of NASA’s original records on the first moon landing, which – however tragic – was probably not considered a sufficiently serious disaster to raise awareness of the issue.

Then again, people in general often don’t know how important it is to preserve the cultural and scientific heritage. The destructions of various libraries in history, especially in the Western and Arabic world, are a testament to this public ignorance which hopefully will one day be overcome.

But much more will be needed than just goodwill to preserve our heritage. The lack of a standard software system means that technology is an issue as well. Instead of the many individual solutions that are in use today, the future will see a need for final productive solutions that can cope with much larger amounts of data!